Alexander Streich Karlsruhe

Construction and performance of the Scintillator Surface Detectors for the Upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina is the largest extensive air shower experiment in the world and plays an important role in the research of cosmic rays and cosmic sources. Since the beginning in 2001, the determination of the mass composition and the analysis of the flux suppression of ultra-high energy cosmic rays are two major topics the Auger Collaboration is working on. To distinguish the best fitting model to describe the energy spectrum of cosmic rays, several parts of the detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory will be upgraded in the following two years. One major part of this upgrade is the installation of Scintillator Surface Detectors (SSDs) on top of the 1660 Water Cherenkov Tanks. The construction of the first 15 scintillator detectors for the Engineering Array inside of the Observatory and the analysis of their performance are the two main topics of this talk.